


the things we carry

by patho (ghostsoldier)



Series: what we talk about when we talk about whalers [3]
Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Low Chaos, Post-Game(s), Spoilers, The Knife of Dunwall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 11:03:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/773480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostsoldier/pseuds/patho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a lot of bodies, after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the things we carry

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of feelings about the Knife of Dunwall DLC, and the Whalers in particular.
> 
> As per usual, most of the named assassins are ones I've written about previously, but you don't need to read my other works for this to make sense.

They all knew, when they agreed to follow him, that each day might be their last. It's a knowledge they carried with them in the most literal sense, in the delicate poison pins tucked away in the trick flaps of their gloves, but Daud also saw it in their eyes, heard it lurking in the edges of their conversations. The men (and the occasional woman) who don the mask and bear his powers might've clawed their way out of circumstances where this life -- shattered floorboards, moldy rugs, disaster of a roof and all -- is preferable to the alternative, but Daud isn't stupid enough to believe that his people would be glad to die for him.

That they would anyway isn't a matter of discussion. He knows they would. They have, and will continue to do so. But it's a heavy knowledge that creeps into their discussions when they think he can't overhear them, and it's only gotten worse in the six awful months since he killed the Empress. That his people will die for him is a given.

But they don’t want to.

There are a lot of bodies, after the Overseers come.

Most of them lie right where they died. Slumped against walls, crumpled into sad heaps on the sodden ground. There are big, dark blotches on their uniforms that leave his gloved fingers red and tacky, and he hated that he had to leave them be as he retook the base. Every corpse he stumbled across and left was another blade sliding between his ribs. They’d all _known_ that this might be their fate, but the blank, empty gazes of their masks sit heavy between his shoulders. Accusatory, as though he’d failed them by allowing this to happen.

And he had, in a way. Allowed it to happen. If his turmoil over the Empress hadn’t led Billie to question his capabilities as a leader, if he hadn’t been so distracted to overlook her -- so obvious in retrospect -- systematic testing of his weaknesses, if he hadn’t been so overconfident about their ability to withstand and repel an attack, if, if, _if_.

Too many hypotheticals, and they all lead back to one damning conclusion -- he’d failed his protégé and his men both. The deaths he’s added to his ledger tonight are senseless ones.

Save for the distant, muffled screams of Overseers being “questioned,” it’s quiet now in the district. Daud told his men to leave the wretched zealots alive and for the most part he doesn’t doubt that they will, but the tense lines of their shoulders and the knots of their clenched fists spoke volumes. There is debt to be paid for tonight. The assassins he sent off with the captives will collect their payment in blood, and every one of their fallen comrades is interest owed.

He’ll check on them in a little while. Make sure things haven’t gone too far. But…not yet. There are other things he must attend to first.

His remaining people have begun to gather the fallen. They lay each one out with exquisite care, lining them up shoulder to shoulder as if they’re awkwardly napping instead of cold and still beneath their masks. It’s too early for rigor to have set in, and the limp, unnatural stillness of their bodies makes Daud want to rip through the muscle and tendon and gristle of every Overseer’s throat until his blade grates on bone.

Even one body would’ve been too many. There are a lot more than one.

One of the assassins -- Smith, he realizes -- crouches. Reaches out. Unbuckles the heavy leather straps of the mask below him. He doesn’t speak, but the breath coming through his respirator is ragged and harsh and his hands tremble slightly as he gently, oh so gently, draws the mask up and off his fallen companion.

Did he already know, Daud wonders, who he’d find beneath?

Other assassins are doing the same now, drawing back hoods and loosening straps, peeling away the masks they’ve all grown accustomed to. Daud recognizes each and every face as it’s revealed -- Akila, Julian, Faraday, most of them young and a depressing number of them people for whom Daud’s powers never quite took hold. The quiet ones, not necessarily skilled in magic or even weapons, but in other ways. Mixing poisons, or strategic planning. Their loss will be keenly felt when the time comes to go against the Brigmore witches. 

As Daud watches, Smith reaches out and tenderly closes Dennam’s wide, staring eyes. 

Their loss will be felt in other ways too.

And he kneels as well, intending to help unmask the remaining bodies, but Tyros grabs his arm. His grip is tight and brooks no argument, and he shakes his head once, sharply. His grip only loosens when Daud draws back again.

“My apologies, sir,” Tyros says. Another initiate kneels in Daud’s place. Unmasks someone that turns out to be Bertram. Wipes the blood from the corners of his mouth and closes his sightless eyes. “This isn’t…that is to say, it’s not…”

He doesn’t seem to know how to finish his sentence, but Daud thinks he understands. This ritual isn’t for him. He may be their leader, but this quiet mourning is _theirs_. The life they live, there usually aren’t any bodies left behind. He knows they’ve found other ways to honor the dead among them, little ceremonies cobbled together from the shared mosaic of their cultural backgrounds. Occasionally, they’ve found ways to manage the disposal of a body here and there, sometimes a few, but _seven_ …

It’s an appalling number. In time he will question them on how they plan to proceed, but for now he leaves them to the near-silent unmasking of the dead and the collecting of bullets and bolts and coins from pockets and pouches, trinkets and poisons hidden away in secret flaps. Each gets its own pile at their feet, and Daud’s lungs ache at the dreadful practicality of it.

He returns to the base. It too bears its own battle scars; the building wasn’t in the best shape to begin with, and now it’s even worse. They have a lot of work ahead.

When he gets to the room they’ve converted into a makeshift dormitory, he’s not surprised to find someone already there. Jenkins, standing in the middle of the floor with his shoulders bowed and his mask under one arm. The right side of his face is a mess of blood and ugly bruising -- even through their gear, his people seem to have taken substantial beatings, especially those unlucky enough to get caught by the teams with the magic-disabling devices. Jenkins had been stiff when Daud released him earlier, stumbling to his feet with unusual clumsiness. But he’d rubbed his wrists and rasped that he was fine, and he’d disappeared before Daud had a chance to ask if he was sure.

Like the rest of the base, the dorms are musty with the smell of mold and wood rot. The air tastes green and damp, and the men gave up on scraping away the moss ages ago. It creeps outward from the cracks in the walls, over the windowsills. As with so many of the ruined buildings around them, this room looks wild and utterly unfit for human habitation.

But in spite of the creaking floorboards and gaping holes in the roof, in spite of the endless assaults of both dust and moss, they’ve made themselves a home here. The blankets may be threadbare and smell faintly of old, chilly cellars, but they’re clean. Their footlockers are neatly centered at the feet of their cots, extra personal effects stacked in tidy piles atop whatever clean, flat surface they’ve been able to find.

Stolen handbills and wanted posters are pasted to the walls, jostling for space with the drawings torn from someone’s sketchbook. Somewhere along the line the wallpaper on one half of the room lost its battle with the encroaching damp, and it’s peeled away from the wall to expose bare wood. One enterprising soul took a bucket of whitewash to the boards, and since then the wall in question has sported an increasingly elaborate collective mural. Daud never sees them working on it -- they get skittish about their creative pursuits when he’s around, and given the way he’d treated such things in the past he supposes he can understand -- but every time he comes in more of the wallpaper is stripped away and the mural is larger. 

Jenkins is staring at it. The expression on his face is a private, complicated one that leaves Daud uneasy, and all around the room are open footlockers, their contents laid out on their respective cots. As the cots near where Jenkins is standing, more and more items remain in the footlockers; the one just to Jenkins’s left is completely full. It’s as if he just…gave up.

“I saw them kill Faraday,” Jenkins says suddenly. His voice is flat, as if he’s commenting on the weather. “We would’ve been fine if not for those damn devices, but. That _sound_.”

“I know,” Daud says.

“It felt like my stomach was being pulled out through my ears,” Jenkins says, as if Daud hadn’t spoken. “It…”

He seems to be struggling for the right word. There isn’t one. Daud knows this from bitter experience. There is no one word for the way the noise of those infernal machines crawls into your head and scrambles everything inside, no word for the shivery nausea or the bright ache in your teeth. It’s like being split down the middle and turned inside out, like claws hooking into your viscera and your eye sockets. It’s a decidedly singular sort of agony.

“It _hurt_ ,” Jenkins says finally. The word itself may be too small to encompass the feeling, but the dreadful finality in the boy’s voice isn’t. “And when Faraday staggered, one of them stabbed him. He didn’t even have time to get his blade up.”

“But they captured you,” Daud says.

Jenkins turns away from the mural. The skin beneath his eyes is dark with weariness, and the right side of his face is such a mess that Daud’s not surprised he removed his mask. His voice is hollow and resigned. “They thought I knew where you were.”

 _“This is your last chance,” the man with the grenade said. From the rooftop, Daud watched Jenkins’s increasingly panicked struggles cease. The boy’s mask swiveled to follow the rise of the Overseer’s hand, the grenade, and in his posture was a terrible acceptance of the inevitable. Because…to die means the questions will stop. It means being free from the worry that you’ll crack. It means the pain will end. And Daud watched the way Jenkins’s masked head tilted back ever so slightly, as if he’d closed his eyes, as if he was_ waiting _…_

_And there were already too many corpses, lying cold and still right where they died._

Right before he’d disappeared, Jenkins had said, “I’ll be all right.”

He’s not all right.

“But you did know where I was,” Daud says.

Jenkins shrugs. The movement is sharp, almost angry. Daud’s never given too much thought for what went on his men’s heads, but now…after Billie…

Maybe it’s something he should’ve wondered about more. Why loyalty unto death from some, betrayal from another? They’re not stupid, his people. Do they all think him weak, the way she did? Or was it her unique combination of drive and ambition and raw natural talent that led her astray?

What had Delilah promised her?

Jenkins is watching him. Unnervingly serious, far too wary.

“She betrayed us too, you know,” he says.

The anger that flares thick and hot in Daud’s chest is almost a _relief_. It’s much better than the introspection that’s consumed his thoughts too often these days. He growls, “You presume to question my judgment?” Stalks forward until Jenkins has to crane his head back to maintain eye contact. “You think I should’ve slit her throat, stuck a knife in her guts, chosen punishment instead of mercy?”

He nearly adds more, things he has no business revealing to someone like Jenkins, the unique awfulness of being betrayed by someone in exactly the way you’d trained them to and for exactly the reasons you’d drilled into them, time and again. That he’s not sure if he truly forgives her -- if he had, wouldn’t he have let her stay? -- or if he just couldn’t bear the thought of pushing his sword through her unresisting body. Couldn’t bear to watch the light in her brown eyes flicker and die, until her gaze was as blank as the kids laid in a row outside.

“I don’t owe you _anything_ ,” Daud almost says, but…that’s not exactly the truth, is it? 

“I’m not saying you should’ve killed her,” Jenkins snaps. It’s the most life Daud’s heard in his voice yet; he’s shrill, sounding just as furious as Daud had a moment ago. “What I’m saying is, you don’t get a monopoly on grief. _She betrayed us too_.”

Billie…hadn’t socialized with the others much. Because Daud hadn’t socialized with the others much, and she was the best of all his men. The brightest. The most driven. He’d been shaping her before he was ever aware of doing so, his beautiful and bloodthirsty knife of a protégé; he’d held himself apart, _above_ , and so she had too.

Most of them respected that she was his second, but camaraderie is a habit that’s died hard in them. They reached out to her the same as they did with him: cautiously, the way you’d approach a strange wolfhound, with lowered gazes and half-smiles and a display of open palms. She’d once consented to a few rounds of Nancy with them and soundly trounced everyone but Reynolds and Thomas, drank with them, admitted, after much insistent pressing, that she’d been born on the twelfth day of the Month of Songs.

And while no one ever mentioned it again, on the twelfth day of the Month of Songs there was an elegant bone-handled knife left on her pillow, along with half a bottle of King Street Brandy and a perfect, freshly-baked apricot tart. Where Smith found the ingredients, Daud had no idea; that the other two gifts were obviously stolen in no way lessened their impact. Billie showed the knife to him later, long after the brandy was carefully tucked away in her footlocker and all that remained of the pastry were sticky traces of apricot and sugar glaze on her fingers.

“I don’t get it,” she’d said. Her voice, usually low and rough with dry amusement, was made soft with bewilderment. “I’m not nice to them. Some days I barely even talk to them.”

Daud had just chuckled and squeezed her shoulder. “It’s a good knife,” was all he’d said. “Make sure you take care of it.”

He’d stopped by her room on his way to the main dorms. She’d preferred to sleep apart from the others, and he’d seen no problem with that. There, perfectly centered on her pillow, was the bone-handled knife.

He draws it now and flips it so the handle is pointed towards Jenkins. Holds it out.

“For the water,” he says, when Jenkins merely looks suspicious and makes no move to take it. “I’ve seen what you all do. The way you—“

The words is a hard, ugly knot in his throat. Jenkins is the one who says, “Mourn.”

Floorboards creak as Daud shifts his stance. He wonders, vaguely, where Billie’s going to go. If any of them will ever see her again, after the years have smoothed away the sharp edges of the hurt like sandpaper shaping broken wood. “It means more to all of you than me,” he says finally. “Take it.”

After a moment of hesitation, Jenkins accepts the knife and tucks it into his belt. Bows his head.

“I couldn’t be out there,” he says quietly. “With the…all the bodies. I know it’s stupid, but they’re my -- I mean, they _were_ …” 

He takes a deep, shuddering breath and lets it out again, appears to be struggling for control in a way he wasn't a moment ago. And Daud is glad, in an awful and selfish way, that the boy hasn’t finished his sentence. He has a feeling the word “family” was going to be involved, and he doesn’t want to think about Jenkins losing yet another family. Doesn’t want to think about seven -- no, eight -- empty beds. About the ones left behind, all of them grieving in their own quiet ways for fallen brothers and lost sisters.

“So I came in here,” Jenkins says, “because I thought I could get their things. For the…well, you know.”

The neat piles on the bed, each one getting progressively smaller and messier until they’re totally nonexistent by the seventh bed. Daud understands all too well what happened. He says, “And there was too much.”

Jenkins’s laugh is small and bleak. “Yes,” he says. “Exactly. It’s all just way too much.”

Daud could offer to help. With two people it would be easier to get everything outside, and it wouldn’t take much time. But he suspects it would be the same situation as before, when Tyros gently held him back from taking off Bertram’s mask. Instead, he says, “I could summon a few others if you’d like the extra help,” and before the boy regains control of his expression the look of relief on his battered face is as sharp as the knife tucked in his belt.

“I guess,” Jenkins says. He’s looking at the mural again, and Daud wonders if he knows whose hands were responsible for each section. If Julian, whose body is even now stiffening outside, scrawled the thick black slashes reminiscent of a massive, stylized squid. If Quinn, laid out beside him, drew the intricate and detailed renderings of Gristol liquor bottles.

Jenkins’s clenched hands betray the forced easiness of his voice. “If Eli or Reynolds aren’t already busy, then I suppose that would work.”

The last Daud saw Eli, the boy had been cross-legged outside, meticulously sorting coins and bullets and crossbow bolts into separate piles. Posture stiff, one arm pressed awkwardly to his left side as if his ribs were hurting him. As for Reynolds, Daud sent him off with the Overseer group. It was a calculated risk -- Reynolds has no love for torture and it’s entirely possible the man will just murder the Overseers outright for what they’d done to his comrades -- but he’s usually solid in a crisis and those are the people Daud needs right now.

He summons both men anyway. Maybe he doesn’t need to explain himself to any of his people, but he _does_ owe them, after a fashion.

Reynolds is still masked. Eli, like Jenkins, is not, and there’s an unhealthy grayish tinge underlying his dark skin. Pain and exhaustion are the likeliest candidates. He’s still holding his left side; Daud suspects a number of the survivors have come away from the day with cracked or broken ribs among their other injuries. Unhappiness flickers in Eli’s eyes when he sees Daud, and then he notices Jenkins and his posture changes. The look he shoots Daud now is a questioning one.

Reynolds is less subtle. His mask turns towards Daud and he snaps, “I was a bit busy, so unless you’ve got another job for me—“

Daud jerks his head in Jenkins’s direction. “He needs extra hands,” he says gruffly. “You’re them.”

Eli’s glance slides around the room. His expression collapses as the pieces slot into place, and in his soft highborn accent he says, “Oh. He was…oh.”

“I could’ve managed a few on my own,” Jenkins says, sounding angry and defensive and _gutted_. “Seven, though. I just…”

Eli blinks out, reappears across the room. Their matching blue-gray leathers rustle as he simply leans against Jenkins’s side and doesn't say a word.

Kids. Practically kids, the both of them.

Reynolds pulls back his hood and wrenches off his mask. He’s pale and drawn, and his expression is much too soft for a man so skilled in the art of murder.

“Get outta here, boss,” he tells Daud. The words quiet and jagged. “We’ve got this.”

Daud leaves. The last thing he sees before the familiar contours of his office reshape themselves around him is Reynolds’s hand coming to rest on Jenkins’s right shoulder, and Eli maintaining his quiet vigil on Jenkins’s other side.

In his office Daud finds his notes on Billie. His musings over the years, and of the past six months. He considers burning them, or simply throwing them out, but in the end he locks them away in one of the few intact cabinets. Maybe later, once the pain is less fresh, he’ll take them out again. Perhaps he’ll even travel to the banks of the Wrenhaven and perform his own quiet adaptation of his Whalers’ memorial ritual. For now, though…

Daud locks the cabinet and tucks the key back into the pouch at his belt. For now, they’re fine right where they are.

*

They let Daud help with what comes next.

The plague shut down the crematoria months ago, and the wood of the Flooded District is too soggy and rotten to burn with the intense, long-lasting heat they’d need for seven bodies. Even if the concept of burial didn’t horrify most of them, the ground around their base is too waterlogged for digging, and no one wants to dump their friends into the river as if they’re no better than plague or murder victims.

Instead, Daud finds them a boat. It’s not big, but it’s big enough.

More importantly, it will burn.

They don’t have many uniforms to spare, but Daud opts for compassion over practicality just this once. They clean up the bodies as best they can -- wipe away blood and flith and tears, gently close eyes -- and then they bring them down to the boat one by one, where they line them up the way they had back at the base, shoulder to shoulder in the bottom of the boat. In death, they are relaxed in a way they never were in life.

The survivors replace the masks of the dead with as much care as they’d removed them. They tighten straps, draw hoods up. They pass around personal effects the way Daud has seen them do in the past, but where previous memorials ended with each item being tossed into the river, this time it’s tucked next to its owner instead.

“His name was Dennam,” one assassin says. “He always stole my cigarettes. He was a bastard. I’ll miss him.”

“Her name was Quinn,” says another. Carefully places a small, shabby book beneath Quinn’s folded hands. “Her knife technique was impeccable. She wrote poetry.”

The ritual goes on, until the footlockers Jenkins and Eli and Reynolds hauled outside are empty and dawn stretches sleepy fingers up the horizon. Daud had been content to observe quietly, but when he sees Jenkins step forward with Billie’s wicked bone-handled knife, he sits up straighter. Jenkins places the knife on the bow of the boat and steps back. He looks so painfully lost that when Daud hears, “Her name was Billie Lurk,” it takes him a moment to recognize the gravelly rasp as his own.

“Her name was Billie Lurk,” Jenkins echoes softly. The name passes through the assembled group, from person to person the way personal effects were handed around just moments before. “She…I hope she finds what she’s looking for.”

And it’s with the utmost care that they crack open the tanks of whale oil and spill it over the wooden boat, the bodies, the mementos. The rich, marine tang of the oil rises in the air, so thick it drowns out the usual riverstink, and when Daud’s sure everyone is clear he uses his tethering to push the boat back until it’s caught in the Wrenhaven’s firm current. Blinks to the bow. Stops time. Lights a match, and carefully places it in the shimmering blue puddle that’s collected in the bottom of the boat.

When he blinks away again and time restarts, the boat immediately ignites with a low, throbbing _whomp_. Blue-white flames race over every oil-soaked surface, and flare into brilliant orange and crimson as the wood and bodies ignite next. A column of searing flame and oily smoke licking towards the sky, traveling downriver towards the sea. The bodies will be nothing but skeletons and ash by the time the ocean swallows them.

And no one says a word as they watch the boat’s path down the river. Masks off to a man, the fire reflecting in their eyes. Daud and his surviving people watch the boat until it’s out of sight, and then they replace their masks and hoods and disappear, one by one.

Heading home.

There’s much to be done.


End file.
